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Mikhaïl Guerman

Vasily Kandinsky

1866–1944

“…his soul strode through his life’s hall of mirrors…”1

Herman Hesse

Text: Mikhaïl Guerman

Cover and layout: Stéphanie Angoh, Griet De Vis

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ISBN: 978-1-78310-419-2

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Contents

Concentration

The Miracle at Murnau

Between East and West

The Return

The “Blaue Reiter”: A Look Back

Vasily Kandinsky: Life and Work

Index of Works

Notes

Exotic Birds, Tretyakow Gallery, Moscow.

Concentration

“We are still — though in a somewhat free handwriting and a way that is upsetting enough to the bourgeois — painting the things of “reality”: people, trees, country fairs, railroads, landscapes. In that respect we are still obeying a convention. The bourgeois calls those things “real” which are seen and described pretty much the same way by everybody, or at least by many people.”

–Hermann Hesse, Klingsor’s Last Summer

Not long ago it seemed that this century had not only begun with Kandinsky, but ended with him as well.[1] But no matter how often his name is cited by the zealots of new and fashionable interpretations, the artist has passed into history and belongs to the past and to the future to a greater degree, perhaps, than to the present. So much has been written and said about Kandinsky. His works, including his theoretical ones, are so well-known that this abundance of knowledge and commonplace opinions often hinders our seeing the artist in his individuality, in his real — not mythologized — significance. With a fresh gaze. From the threshold of the third millennium.

Weary of arch postmodernist games, the experienced and serious viewer today seeks in Kandinsky that which no one had seen in him earlier — and had not attempted to see: a buttress in an unstable world of artistic phantoms and fashionable shams. What just less than a hundred years ago was born as a bold revelation has now passed over into the category of eternal values. Among the titans of modernist art, Kandinsky was a patriarch. Matisse was born in 1869; Proust, in 1871; Malevich, in 1878; Klee, in 1879; Picasso, in 1881; Kafka, in 1883; Chagall, in 1887. Kandinsky himself was born in 1866, a year that also witnessed the birth of Romain Rolland and the publication of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Anna Karenina had yet to be written and no one had yet pronounced the term “Impressionism.” Kandinsky, in a word, was born in “the very depths” of the nineteenth century. Kandinsky was twenty when the last exhibition of the Impressionists opened; he was thirty-four when Ambroise Vollard held the young Picasso’s first one-man show in his gallery. At the turn of the century Kandinsky was only just beginning to become a professional, his name was still unknown — and he did not yet know himself.

Gouspiar, Tretyakow Gallery, Moscow.

The Port of Odessa, late 1890s.

Oil on canvas, 65 x 45 cm,

Tretyakow Gallery, Moscow.

Kandinsky’s intellectualism and that of his art have constantly been noted by scholars and essayists. This situation is not typical: the young paladins of the avant-garde attracted their adepts not so much with knowledge and logic as with the radicalism and the spiritedness of their opinions; and, more often, with a meaningful incomprehensibility interspersed with brilliant revelations. The destiny of a master who linked his art with Russia, Germany and France; his work as a teacher in the celebrated Bauhaus; his prose, verse and theoretical writings; his unbending and determined path towards individuality — all of these things have made Kandinsky more than just another of the great artists of the twentieth century. In the culture of our age he has occupied a quite exceptional place: the place of an artist alien to vanity and with a desire to shock the viewer; the place of a master inclined to constant and concentrated meditation, to unswerving movement towards a synthesis of the arts, to the quest for more perfect, ascetic and strict formal systems. Moreover, Kandinsky’s art does not reflect (or, if one may say so, is not burdened by) the fate of other Russian avant-garde masters. He left Russia well before the semi-official Soviet esthetic turned its back on modernist art. He himself chose where he would live and how he would work. He was forced neither to struggle with fate nor to enter into conspiracy with it. His “struggles” took place “with himself” (Boris Pasternak). The persecutions to which “leftist” artists in Russia were subjected left him untouched and did not complicate his life. Neither, however, was he was awarded a crown of thorns or the glory of a martyr, like the lot of those famous avant-garde artists who remained in Russia. His reputation is in no way obliged to fate — only to art itself. The culture of the past was for him precious and intelligible: he was not concerned with the smashing of idols. Creating the new occupied him entirely. He aspired neither to iconoclasm nor to scandalous behavior. It could hardly be said that his work lacked daring, but this was a daring saturated with thought, a polite daring argued with art of the highest quality.

Landscape Near Achtyrka, Tretyakow Gallery, Moscow.

Achtyrka. Autumn, sketch, 1901.

Oil on canvasboard, 23.7 x 32.7 cm,

Municipal Gallery of Lenbachhaus, Munich.

Munich. Schwabing, 1901. Oil on cardboard,

17 x 26.3 cm, Tretyakow Gallery, Moscow.

Educated in the European manner, a man of letters, a professional musician, and an artist much more inclined to reflection and to strict (but not altogether unromantic) logic than to loud declarations, Kandinsky preserved the dignity of a thinker, refusing to dissipate this dignity in petty quarrels within the artistic world. It has been said many times and said justly that the roots not only of Kandinsky’s art, but of his attitude to life in general, lay in Russia and Germany. It is of the essence here that Kandinsky identified Russia with Moscow. As opposed to the majority of those of his famous compatriots who shared his views (if such existed in the full sense of the phrase), Kandinsky had practically no connections with the culture of St. Petersburg. Kandinsky escaped that purgatory between East and West, unable to accept its cool refinements and traditional passéisme. Petersburg’s dangerous and seductive mirages left his mind unclouded and his heart uninspired. In intellectual terms, especially as concerns philosophy, Kandinsky was oriented towards the German traditions.[2] But notwithstanding his interest in the past, he did not become its hostage, seeing in its wisdom the foundations for understanding and building the future. Kandinsky painted his earliest works when already a mature man. Kandinsky was in the zenith of his fourth decade.

Red Church, 1901.

Russian Museum, St Petersburg.

Mountain Lake, 1899. Oil on canvas, 50 x 70,

Manukhina Collection, Moscow.

Summer River

A time in life when it is not easy to feel oneself a beginner. His first known canvasses date from the turn of the century: 1899 — Mountain Lake (M. G. Manukhina collection, Moscow); 1901 — Munich. Schwabing (Tretyakov Gallery); Akhtyrka. Autumn (Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich); c. 1902 — Kochel (Tretyakov Gallery). The painting Odessa — Port (late 1890s, Tretyakov Gallery), which opened the celebrated 1989 Kandinsky retrospective, already concealed a certain magic.[3] While that exposition was still being prepared, amidst the abstract works or alongside the pictorial insights of Murnau, this painting seemed nearly dilettantish and almost Wanderesque. But next to it, any Wanderer landscape seemed passive and rooted in an impression taken from life. Of course, looking for the traits of future genius in the work of a neophyte is a very sly pursuit: it is easy to find what one wants to find instead of what is there. But, nevertheless, its elastically outlined, dark and radiant patches are much too independent of the object world, there is too much hidden tension in them which is unconnected with any real motif. The much too powerful drawing appears purely decorative alongside a fairly naive and traditional understanding of objective form.

And later, in his famous , the phrase “Unten stach der kleine blaue grüne See die Augen” (“Down below the little blue green lake caught his eye”)[5]